Uncompressed AVIs from HitFilm not playable?

I have a couple of composites that I'm working on in HitFilm, and I need to edit them into a film... They're both sync sound clips (dialog), so I'm trying to get AVI working, but so far neither Edius nor Media Player nor Vegas 13 (trial) will open them. For that matter, neither will HitFilm.

Comments

I've just created an avi of a 1 minute clip and it opens fine in HitFilm and plays in Windows Media Player. Well play is not the right word as 1080/50p uncompressed is 17GB for 1 minute so I think my hard drive is having a hard time keeping up, but it does open and play back is just a little choppy.

Sorry, this doesn't really help you other than to say it works fine on my machine

After I got home last night I tried some things because of your comments in the other thread but I regret to say I've been pretty unsuccessful in exporting an AVI from Hitfilm that won't open in other programs. I did finally export an HDV clip without audio that wouldn't open in Media Player but it still opened in Vegas and Edius.

The closest I've gotten to not opening in Edius is when I initially dropped a clip in Edius I got the Spinning Circle of Eternal Waiting and then nothing. No error or crash it was just as if I hadn't done anything. I immediately tried again and everything worked like it was supposed to.

I also got the clip that wouldn't open in Media Player to play by using Avisynth. I have no idea what the difference would be here because Avisynth is a frameserver that serves up uncompressed AVI frames. Weird.

Ok I just downloaded the clip but the first thing is the file size is reported as being 4.2 GB but I only downloaded 2.9 GB before the file was marked as complete which I found a little strange. Next I tried opening the clip with Media Player and it did open although playback was choppy.

From there I moved on to VirtualDub. VirtualDub immediately claimed the index block was missing and attempted to recreate one. Reopened the file again this time with the extended options checked and forced rekeying of the video stream. VirtualDub keyframed through 720 frames and then reported an error with the audio stream. Tried going through frame by frame and was unable to read frames 73 - 182, 259 - 344, 432 - 517, and 604 - 690.

In case the download was corrupted I'll try downloading it again a little later.

Interesting. I'll have to see if I can get VirtualDub to play it back, though I need to transcode it to something I can use, still. Aargh.

I do expect it to be choppy when uncompressed, because it's big and standard hard drives, i.e. ones that aren't striped, probably won't have enough bandwidth to sustain smooth playback... but since I plan on transcoding it to an intermediate shouldn't be a problem... provided that I can get it to load in something I can transcode it with.

I did two (or rather, started) two experiments yesterday with this comp. One was to export an image sequence (PNG) that I was thinking I'd try to load in Edius and render HQX there, but I didn't get that far yet. I'll try it tonight, though.

The reason that I didn't get that far is that I also tried doing the comp in Fusion. First off, there's a LOT more to tweak in Fusion, but the chroma key also needed more tweaking. The end result looks great, nearly identical to the end result that came up with in HitFilm, though it took longer to get it right since it was my first attempt at compositing in Fusion.

Here's the surprise though... the composite shot takes approximately 45 minutes to render compressed in HitFilm. The Fusion render to HQX has an estimated render time of 15 hours according to Fusion.

And that's why I didn't try loading the image sequence in Edius yet... I didn't expect the Fusion render to take anywhere near that long. :-/

I haven't gotten it sorted yet. I've been looking for alternatives, which are working, but a pain in the ass, since all of the workarounds so far require re-syncing the audio visually. At least that will take less time than a 15-hour Fusion render, which might be due to Fusion not using OpenCL because it doesn't detect it, even though Resolve does on the same machine.

I'll try to snag a copy of MediaInfo to inspect the files and see what's up. They're still in my google drive folder linked above in case you want to pass them on to your devs to have a look.

Anyway, my thought process was along the lines of; you're creating a 4GB plus file and avi used to be limited I think to 4GB, or maybe that was a file system limitation or both, and thus I thought that the avi you were creating may just be too big. When I woke up this morning I realised that was rubbish as the test file I created was 17GB and it worked fine.

A couple of thoughts/work arounds have occurred to me;

1) Any reason why you don't want to export to mp4, yes I know it's not a intermediate format, but if you crank up the profile/level/bit rate the quality should be fine (or do you want alpha?).

2) If mp4 is no good, how about exporting an image sequence and then also export an mp4 but only use the audio when you import to Edius, thus you wont have to manually sync. I might just go have a look at the feature request thread and make sure export audio is on the list

The mp4 option is limited to h.264, and won't let me export the video in its original resolution, since it's limited to HD.

#2 might be a great option for simplifying the manual sync process though, so I will try doing that tonight.

HitFilm needs better intermediate support, and audio only to go with an image sequence would b e a big help also. Especially if we can get an audio only export that doesn't downsample the original source audio, though the quality of that recording is clean enough to probably not need much post, so even if it gets downsamples to 96KHz it will be fine. I suppose in the worst case I can re-sync it with the original production audio in PluralEyes if I have to, once I have it resynced.

That's what I thought you meant. So I would need to export an mp4, use that to sync up with the image sequence and then drop the mp4 video track, then resync the whole dealie in PluralEyes using the original production audio track, right?

#Set the audio source - be sure not to use AVISource here it will choke on the fact there isn't a video track

Audio = DirectShowSource("Path to\audiotrack.avi").KillVideo

#Interleave the audio with the image sequence

AudioDub(video, audio)

Save the script and test with VirtualDub. If it works you can now transcode to the intermediate codec of your choice or you can try the Avisynth Virtual File System or some other method like creating a signpost file to get Edius to import the avs script as an avi without having to go to an intermediate. Either way you shouldn't have to resort to syncing the audio again. Trying this might also help pinpoint some of the other export problems you've had.

To be honest, for me the biggest issue is being unable to dump the audio in WAV or AIFF. Lacking XML (which basically only gives a cut list, anyway) isn't too big a deal. A PNG sequence gives me a lossless intermediate and renders faster than a DNxHD for half the disk space of uncompressed AVI, and my other NLE'S do great with Image Sequences.

Yeah, the resynch in Pluraleyes is an extra step or two, but, hey! It's Pluraleyes. At least the extra step is adding one media clip to your original synch file and hitting a button.

You can choose to export audio only in an AVI container. Just untick the Video checkbox. That will give you an AVI with an uncompressed 16-bit stereo PCM audio stream, which other NLEs should import fine. If necessary you can use tools like Audacity or QuickTime Pro to open the AVI and extract the audio and save/encode to a different container.